Prompt Element Dependency

Some prompt elements require another element already be present, and some exclude each other, both of which prompt assembly must be able to express.

Dependency is one of three relational dimensions any prompt assembly method must account for between elements (alongside position and importance). It governs how including one element affects whether another can or should be included, in two categories:

• Requirements — one element depends on another being present first, for example needing to establish "Richard is the protagonist of The Beach" before a later element can state "He grew up in England" and still make sense.
• Incompatibilities — one element excludes another, often when the same information has multiple presentations (a summary versus a detailed explanation of the same fact). If the assembly engine supports incompatibilities as a first-class relation, you can register both versions with an exclusion note between them — using the longer version when space allows, and falling back to the shorter one otherwise. This is exactly the mechanism elastic snippets's "multiple overlapping prompt elements" approach relies on.

Once content — static and dynamic alike — has been transformed into prompt elements carrying position, importance, and dependency properties, the prompt is ready to be assembled.

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Sources

• Prompt Engineering for LLMs (John Berryman), ch. 6